Thursday, 22 March 2018

This was a major battle between the Astra Militarum and the Death Guard that took place in the sunken ruins of Chernobog. It was an important victory for the Imperium that saw the enemy forces routed so badly, they they never returned to the region for the rest of the war.

This week was the revenge match for my brutal defeat at the hands of Ashleigh a few weeks back. This time he promised to bring a infantry heavy army rather than a mechanized list. Even so I had expected at least tank of some description and so I brought a Renegade Knight and a Plagueburst Crawler. The only vehicles that my opponent brought were a pair of sentinel walkers. Was I going to be able to bring down quite so many infantry? We shall see...

Both of us were running late that evening so our planned 2000 points was probably stretching things a bit but we played as much as we could before the venue wanted to close for the night. Our mission of choice was Sealed Orders as neither of us had played it before. We rolled Search and Destroy for the deployment and although I got choice of zone none of them were actually suitable. I made a choice just on the fact that it gave me easy access to two objective markers.

First turn and I tried to advance to get the objectives closest to me. At the same time I kept back the Knight, and the helforged dreadnought as Ashleigh had kept some units in reserve. I didn't want them coming down behind me if I could help it. I also didn't want to go too far forward in case I left myself open. One of my secret objectives was casting psychic powers and I completely forgot to do so turn one. My shooting was ineffective as well. I think I killed one ratling sniper and one of the sentinels.

Ashleigh's turn one was a lot better. Not a lot moved but he did bring in a pair of assassin's in and a load of rough riders on my left flank. The assassins did a good good of dropping my plague caster down to a single wound. He managed to inflict some injuries and a couple kills.

Turn two and I made sure to protect my plague caster with a Death Guard stratagem that stopped Ashleigh from shooting him. I also turned my knight, both chaos spawn and helforged contemptor to dealing with those units that came in from my flank. I couldn't afford to just ignore them and they had to die. It was a tough decision but I used this turn to drop Typhus and his Deathshroud terminators down as close to my right flank as the enemy would allow me. It wasn't all that helpful but I knew that I needed them to try and draw fire. I also remembered to do a psychic power this turn thus ensuring I achieved something from my objective cards. Most of my shooting was reasonable but I did manage to blast a fair few out of the rough riders and guardsmen that had popped up to my left. The knight and chaos spawn charged in and were rather successful. Most of the enemy died to mighty titanic feet or to the claws of the spawn.

Due to the venue wanting to close we managed to get a complete third turn before we had to pack up. The third turn was the decider whether we had achieved any further turns or not. Ashleigh succeeded in blasting down my Knight but sadly it just toppled over rather than exploding. Typhus lost his bodyguard squad and was knocked down as well. When the game ended, I had very little left and the Guardsmen still had the majority of their army sitting there.

When it came to it my opponent had scored five or six objectives to my four. Victory went to the Cadians this day. Good game as always. Maybe next time we try this we should play smaller points and see what a difference that makes.

Wednesday, 14 March 2018

The battle for Site 2212 was a major battle for the Death Guard as they fought to breach the Aeldari defences and reach their desired targets. There had been many minor engagements, skirmishes really, since the Death Guard landed nearly two months ago but this was the first to field significant numbers. The surprise came when it was revealed that the Aeldari had brought forth Drukhari mercenaries to aid in driving off the favoured sons of Nurgle.

This match was against another new player to the club Charlie. We picked a simple mission from my list ahead of time and set to building out lists. I had thought that Charlie played Blood Angels so I was surprised to see a combined Drukhari and Saim-Hann list deployed before me.

A fair bit of Charlie's army was deployed in transports or was flying above the battlefield. I was perhaps a bit too cautious and deployed quite far back into my deployment zone or as in the case of Typhus and his ground forces right behind a wall. The Aeldari got the first turn and I failed to seize the initiative as usual.

The flyer detachment zoomed in and with a lot of massed fire destroyed my plague drone, thus earning first blood. From what I recall the rest of his shooting was not very effective. I lost a few wounds from the plagueburst crawler as I recall but this was a time in the game where I was making a lot of my disgustingly resilient rolls. This is me though and that luck petered out as the game went along. I think Charlie scored two of his tactical objectives putting him on three victory points at the end of the first turn.

My first turn and I think I was still being cautious. Previous experience against the Aeldari has made me so I think. I didn't move up very much but I had some easy to achieve tactical objectives. My shooting caused some damage to the flyers but I was mostly pleased with a direct hit from the plagueburst mortar which destroyed a venom in one shot! My first turn and I did well to score four objective cards.

As the game progressed I couldn't get too far up the table as the Aeldari shooting was rather accurate. I was soon able to down the planes and a fair few number of his Drukhari infantry. I felt for that poor warrior who stood his ground against a rampaging chaos spawn before it tore him limb from limb! Sadly the spawn didn't last much longer afterwards. We both started to lose a lot of what we had remaining on the table. I forget exactly now after nearly a week, what dropped what but I remember my cultists being rather stubborn and not running, dying to the last man.

Towards the end of the game Charlie was able to access a webway portal behind my lines and dropped some wytches. The Scourges dropped down too, massacring my cultists and then assaulting the crawler. They soon died to that though. The wytches slaughtered there way through my plague marines, a killing that I had not expected. My DR rolls hard failed me.

The game ended turn 5 and neither of us had much left to gather our dead. We counted up the victory points and the game was a draw. A couple hours later I realized that I had had a tactical objective that gave me a victory point if Typhus survived the game so in theory I won but I can't in good conscious include it as if I didn't remember at the time then tough. A draw was still a good result and one I was happy with. A very enjoyable game.

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After thoughts...

A very good fun game. Not nearly as tough as I had expected considering what I am used to with the Aeldari. Charlie was a good casual opponent and I am looking forward to a nice rematch in the near future.